The relevance of a public health frame in supporting the climate change impact awareness
and consensus on actions is well recognized but largely underutilized. Overall, supporting public
health’s capacity in climate change has focused on projecting and highlighting public health
impacts due to climate change, identifying public health policy responses, and emphasizing public
health role. The integration of the public health perspective in the discussion and communication
of climate change ideas has remained elusive.<div>Climate change is also a complex social problem whose construction of meaning and
actions is rooted in institutionalized language, discourse, and human interactions. Thus,
understanding of the construction of the relevance of public health in climate change discourse is
central to understanding the impediments of the public health frame application. Unfortunately,
this has been a neglected area of research, and the dissertation responded to that gap. </div><div>To delineate the impediments of the public health frame, the study used the case study of
the context of climate change policy discourse in the Province of Ontario (Canada) to examine
the construction of public health relevance, the extent of public health frame application, and the
systematic influences in the discourse.</div><div>The analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews revealed that the public
health frame remained isolated from the primary focus of Ontario’s climate change policy
discourse. Instead, Ontario’s historically and socially constructed climate change as an economic
and political issue solved through market strategies and technological innovations forwarded by
political, bureaucratic, and technological elites. The focus substantiated the types of structures
and processes of policies and decisions, the relevant actors and knowledge, and the values
supporting the discursive, normative, and strategic practices. Ontario’s focus also limited the
utilization of the public health frame and the supporting capacities through the misalignment
between public health and the provincial strategic actions, the lack of recognition and integration of public health roles, mandate and structures, and limited public health capacity building
initiatives.</div><div>Therefore, public health framing as an endpoint of climate change discourse requires
legitimation of public health in the underlying institutional structures for, and governance of,
climate change. </div>
Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health
